Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of Ed Ruscha prints from the 1970’s to the present from November 2 through December 23. A selection of the artist’s drawings will also be included in the show.

 Long an influential voice in postwar American painting, Ed Ruscha is also one of contemporary art’s most significant graphic artists.  He began making informal editions in the late 1950’s and produced his first published lithograph in 1962.  He has worked with most major print workshops in the United States and abroad, including Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Editions Alecto, Cirrus Editions, Graphicstudio, Edizione O, and Hamilton Press, to produce over three hundred prints.

Highlights of the show will include the early silkscreens News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues in which Ruscha used unconventional organic materials such as black-currant preserves and salmon roe raw egg, fruit-pie filling, chocolate syrup, axel grease and caviar in place of printing inks; the portfolio, Cameo Cuts, and The End, in which he explores the more physical properties of film as the images appear to have been scratched or sliced; and several lithographs such as “OK”  and “Question?,”  in which the artist employed a splatter technique used in the past in lithographs by such artists as Toulouse-Lautrec and Dubuffet, where a spray of tusche applied to the plate through a paper stencil creates a finely textured background.

Ruscha’s work has been exhibited internationally for three decades and is represented in many major museum collections.  In 1999 a major traveling retrospective, Ruscha: Editions 1959-1999, originated at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and then to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL.  In 2001,The California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, acquired the entire archive of Ruscha’s 325 prints and 800 working proofs.

For more information please contact us at 212-206-6872 or [email protected]